I was doing a report for work, and figured I would share it so others can find and easily compare affordable Text Message Marketing services.

Today I installed the Total Video Pack with Kaltura’s media capabilities. This allows me to post video to my blog, remix it and more, and even cooler….allows people to post video responses to the videos I post.

This is some really cool stuff and I hope to be posting more of it when we start getting our film project underway.

I use this old Arf! video as the test video when I do video because it has a good size and doesn’t say much about anything.

So, it’s been awhile since I have posted anything about what I am doing with myself and I know you are all waiting. Probably hanging on my every word. I know you love me and I love myself, hi-dee-ho hi-dee-ho… not really but what the hell, I have your attention anyway.

Anyway, here’s the low-down. Since Prior to July 27th, I was modulating mos of my time at work between the California Fig advisory board websites, and the holsteinworld.com redesign…both of which are heavily laden with a bunch of “new to me” technologies.

For holsteinworld.com, I wrote a complete custom CRM that controls just about everything you can see on the site from graphics and colors, navigation and menus, news, calendars and feeds right down to just about every miniscule detail. Most of it probably could have been done in Drupal, but this can do a lot that Drupal can’t touch, and it’s very easy to use for our team since it was built with them in mind, and technical functions are taken care of in a predetermined way rather than requested of a user who might not know what they mean.

For the California Fig board, I built the website with a less encompassing Content Manager and a Fig Recipe database unlike anything else on the market. This is where I got my grounds with MySql since I had never actually done anything with it and pretty much got dropped into it without a life jacket. I think I did well.

Following that, I developed a Virtual Page Manger for websites that allows me to design a template, and the owner of the website to edit the content from a simple Admin panel in a very easy manner. No coding necessary, SEO is built in and the plugin system is well on it’s way to being what I could be a fresh new technology. (XML Based plugins) The cool thing about it is that I can simply build a template and drop it in place. The manager will take care of the rest. (Search, Statistics, Menus, and other page content) This truly separates design from content.

But lately, I have been working on two projects. One to offer our customers, and one to replace the defaced Moo-Tube.net.

For the customers, we now have a complete and customizable E-Commerce solution. An E-store that can be added into your website, self-managed and easily adapted to just about any design, payment and shipping system. I have a pretty complete set of shipping integrators with UPS and the U.S. Postal Service. The only payment gateway currently integrated is Paypal, but others should be pretty easy to add support for.

And for us… there is Moo-Tube 2.0. A revolutionary new video sharing platform. Moo-Tube 2.0 is easily themed from Dreamweaver, supports video uploads, rating commenting, and more. It also allows users to comment on each others’ profile, “wall to wall” style commenting, and more. That is just the basic rundown, other features are in store but will be unveiled with the site. We’ll just say it’s the next step towards integrating functionality of YouTube and Facebook into one place.

So, if anyone wonders why I usually disappear from “being online” for most of the evening, it’s because I need to recharge from grabbing amazing pieces of code out of thin air and hammering them out on the keyboard.

Have a great day everyone and if you’re interested in any of these technologies, let me know! I’m happy to help anyone who might be struggling with some of the things I have already solved.

Last night I figured out what was wrong with the computer I’m rebuilding for the rack.  Turns out it was the motherboard.  I took all of the parts out and installed the Syntax Motherboard I used to have in my main system.  No more CRC Errors, no more errors of any type….but I need to pick up some more standard DDR memory for it (all I have in it now is 64MB).  CentOS runs OK under 64 Mb and the only problem I have had so far was from the PSMOUSE advanced mouse driver and my KVM Switch. I dropped the mouse driver down to the Generic one, no wheel but it doesn’t do all sorts of unexpected things now.

I plan on using this machine as a development web server so I can free up the resources used on my desktop machine.  It will also be more like what my web host is running. (CentOS 4.6)

I can’t afford to buy CPanel for a development machine, so I’ll use Ravencore, and follow this guide for some of the basic stuff.  Since Ravencore is written in PHP and bash scripts, I might add some of my own features to it.  I’ve written independent management scripts before… maybe I can make it mimic CPanel/WHM more closely.

Work on Jeep

Today I took the day off to have a new muffler put on my jeep, the tires rotated, and an oil change.  Basic maintenance that should be done regularly.  The muffler looks good, and the oil change is nothing special.  On the other hand, the tires could not be rotated because the tread was too worn, so I bought 4 new ones for $99 each (installed price).  The only thing is, I don’t think they did the balance right.  I’m getting vibration between about 55 and 65 mph, and 70 – 75 mph.   I’ll be back down that way this weekend and get that taken care of, or go to the Kost in N. Syracuse to get that taken care of.  Other than that, most of the work looks satisfactory.

Conficker

I have been hearing a lot about Conficker (or confucker … configuration fucker), and how it is supposed to take the world by storm on April 1st. (coincidentally when NY says I’ll have my taxes back)

I have to say that it is interesting to see so many organizations working together to prevent it from bing a huge problem.  I am doing my part by switching to OpenDNS (myself, and work) and spreading the word.  So…. if you don’t already have a plan in place, here is your chance to start one.  (no, I don’t work for them, but their service has been a life saver frequently) OpenDNS is a free service that provides Domain Resolution (makes www.wherever.com point to 123.45.678.243 or whatever the IP address is) and content moderation.  In a business network, it can be used to block certain types of websites, chat services and other unacceptable Internet related activities.  At home, it’s useful for keeping phishing sites from loading before they even get to your computer.

To learn more about OpenDNS, go to their site.  To start using OpenDNS, follow these instructions.  To learn about how they are blocking conficker, read this blog entry.  If you have a prent, grandparent, less savvy family member you know of, setup OpenDNS for them too. They’ll thank you on April 1st if you do.

That being said, good luck with your own vehicle repairs, and keep up the battle against malware!

Behold!  The future…. more soon

<page>

<head>

<title>Page Title</title>

</head>

<body>

<content1>Content for Content 1</content1>

<content2>Content for Content 2</content2>

</body>

</page>

Lately I have been getting quite disappointed in some Open Source solutions to problems. Mainly the lack of Rapid Design web development tools.

Face it, if your company doesn't use a CMS, and you have to edit a lot of pages, doing it by hand is just not realistic. That leaves you very little choice but to use a WYSIWYG HTML Editor.

Sure, there are some OK ones out there. Frontpage, GoLive, Dreamweaver, and such. The drawback to these is the price tag, and lack of cross-platform capabilities. (yes, I know GoLive and Dreamweaver work on Windows and Mac OS X)

Sure, there are a few open source, cross-platform editors, such as that built into OpenOffice, Composer, and NVU (KompoZer). There is also soon to be the Quanta Plus VPL Editor when KDE4 is released. (it currently doesn't run on Windows or Mac)

The problem with these tools is that they lack they don't stand up to their commercial competition in any way.

NVU Just plain out Sucks. It's buggy, crash-prone, and can't resist changing code (even scripts) that you type in Code view to another format. Sure, we all know it's because they validate by rendering it, then using the source code as the browser uses it, but it leaves a lot to be desired for editing ability.

I haven't used it in a while, and have heard good things about composer as far as stability and features go. However, I would imagine it has the same code formatting problem as NVU because it's Gecko-based… which leaves it off-limits to me since it would be difficult to integrate the pages with my scripts.

As for the OpenOffice Offering, it just seams weak. Sure, it looks good if you are replacing say… FrontPage Express, Word or the plethora of other free web page editors for web page editing, but there is no serious site management that I can see.

Enter Eclipse…

Eclipse is a tool that is appealing, wonderful, and somewhat of a sore spot all at the same time.

Eclipse has Excellent project management, Tons of great features for code editing and debugging, and the Text-based HTML Editors are second to none.

For PHP, debugging is almost real-time, and from what I can see (not first-hand) Java development, being it's main vice, is awesome. Stylesheet editing is coming along pretty good, and is a pretty good replacement for TopStyle. These things are great, and I use them all for web applications and even building somewhat attractive interfaces. However, it's no to so good when your project contains a bunch of static pages. The Visual HTML Editing just lacks.

I have tried MyEclipse, TruStudio Professional, richedit4html, Web Page Editor and the OpenOffice Integration Plugin so far, and none of them is really what I need.

The closest things to a winner would be the TruStudio Professional editor, and the OpenOffice integration. They both have a good feature set, and are pretty straight forward to use, especially if you don't like digging through menus to do common tasks.

So, here are my thoughts as to what a good visual HTML Editor should do.

First, it should be integrated as an editor in Eclipse. The Project management is a HUGE plus, and the Outline is useful too. (Hint: Expressions Web Designer uses theirs for Tag properties)

Path management similar to FrontPage 2003. I like the ability to select a specific tag from within the Design View, and bring up properties for it, or edit it without going in to code view. It's also useful for stripping out the Crap inserted when someone copies from a Word Document and pastes into Frontpage. (Remove Tag)

The Styles tool bar. This thing is great. I can create a Stylesheet, link it to my page, and my classes and IDs appear in a drop-down list so I can go into a table cell, or click on a tag in the path management, and apply my class to it, or if I created a style for an ID, I can set the ID of the element from a drop-down list.

Scripting… I have a few custom VBA Scripts for doing such things as fixing text capitalization and such, but VBA is seriously overkill for a macro language. Maybe our visual editor should have a language similar to the mIRC scripting language or something along those lines…that just has classes and functions for dealing with elements in the editor, or things you can put in a web page…and make sure there is a Macro Recorder so one could create a macro on-the-fly.

Other than that, I think the standard tool bar would be fine… and something akin to the table tool bar…. probably buttons for form elements, but leave actions and such up to code view.

That's all!

Aside from that, there isn't much else to want in a Visual HTML Editor.

After evaluating my life, realizing I’m not cool, and never will be, I applied the Dust and Bones formula to my depression, and decided that it will all work out in the very end.

Since then, I have picked up a new… and more healthy obsession. This week it has been Vector Graphics.

The first time I ever heard about them, (1993) I thought they were awesome, and would be the best way to do graphics. Between then, and about two years ago, I gave up on ever doing vector graphics since they were limited to high-end software that I could never afford.

Fast Forward… two years ago…. I get this great new job designing websites. Kicking and screaming, I was forced to use Photoshop, since it’s what we use at work. I used to prefer Paint shop Pro, didn’t know what layers were, and they annoyed me because they got in my way… PhotoShop showed me the light and it grew on me, now using anything else seems like sacrificing what I can truly do.

Doing web graphics, interfaces, buttons, and other things in PhotoShop, I discovered that paths, Shapes, and fonts could be scaled. Furthermore, I learned that I could use these items in Adobe Illustrator, and make all of my web graphics so I can scale them without the sacrifice of quality.

Now for a little background on Vector graphics versus bitmap graphics. Bitmap graphics literally take an image and build it with a collection of colored dots. You get a higher quality image by increasing your dpi (dots per inch). To enlarge a bitmap image, your imaging program will enlarge the dots, and apply a blur to them for blending. This will cause the image to become unbearable at some point depending on your dpi and original image size.

Vector graphics on the other hand don’t generally store your image as dots. Remember your Geometry, and calculus from school. Vector graphics are a collection of formulas for slope, distance, so on and so forth. This means to make a graphic bigger, it just increases the value going into the functions, and viola a larger graphic without any blockiness or blur. Moreover, vector graphics are smaller, since there is usually 8, 16, or 24 bits of data stored per dot in a bitmap, where a vector can store a formula, and a color code. Less overall data… so now that you are educated back to my writing.

I can now make graphics that can be anything from the size of an icon, up to the size of a Billboard without losing quality. I have achieved near perfection…or so I thought. I wanted to do vector graphics at home, but when I saw the price tag on Corel Draw, I decided that I would stick to the free software.

Lately I have discovered a few good programs that do the trick. Inkscape is great, free, and useful… but I wasn’t completely comfortable using it. Then I was reading through Wikipedia, and found the list of Vector graphics editors. This listed a few very useful things, including my newest favorite… Xara Xtreme which I have found to be faster, and easier to use than Inkscape or Illustrator. After just a few days’ use, I have been able to get accustomed to how it works, and enjoy the features (or lack of extra confusion created with additional features).

Watch for vector graphics on more of my web sites, and in more of my projects. I absolutely love SVG, and high quality scalable graphics.

I also have to give some credit to LiTha-paint for their online editor. It’s very nice, and almost completely usable… a truly outstanding program.

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Amos Vryhof